Josephine: Napoleon's Incomparable Empress

DeLorme, a fellow of the International Napoleon Society, is a self-professed lover of France and of Josephine. Her admiration for the empress does not, however, tip over into worship; her subject clearly had her flaws, chief among them extravagance and a degree of sexual looseness. In presenting Josephine's story from her birth on Martinique to her marriage to the aristocrat Alexandre de Beauharnais, who died on the guillotine, and her own narrow escape from that same fate, her marriage to Napoleon, her reluctant divorce and early death at her chateau, Malmaison, at the age of 50, DeLorme provides an attractive and largely convincing portrait of a woman whose grace, dignity and exquisite taste in decoration helped legitimize her upstart Corsican husband as one who could claim the empire for reasons not confined solely to his military triumphs. In DeLorme's view, the marriage between Napoleon and Josephine remains one of the great romances of history, only lightly marred by Napoleon's extramarital amours and his divorce and remarriage to the Archduchess Marie-Louise for dynastic reasons. In a year marked by revisionist views of Napoleon (Paul Johnson's entry in the Penguin Lives series and Christopher Hibbert's forthcoming Napoleon: His Wives and Women, reviewed above), this sumptuously illustrated and charming volume will bring comfort to readers still under the spell of the magnetic emperor and his glittering wife.
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